BLOODSHOT

In what looks a visually stunning ode to the Australian criminal folk hero, nothing in this ‘true’ story about Ned Kelly and his compadres is in fact real. The movie states just as much at the beginning. It is however, based on many recorded factual events and spiced up with a splash of the fanciful, daring and macabre. The superb George Mackay stars as the eponymous criminal as we chart his life from impoverished Irish immigrant child, who is taken from his Lady Macbeth mother (Essie Davis) into the care of outlaw Harry Power (Russell Crowe), to leader of an off-the-grid army living on society’s fringes. Throughout his upbringing Kelly is constantly encouraged to take whatever he desires by force and, when he teams up with fellow disgruntled vagabonds in his twenties, manages to convince numbers to join the collective – strolling across a burgeoning Antipodean nation, carving out ill-gotten corners for themselves.

This week’s big budget action superhero film is the perfect Vin Diesel vehicle. An elite soldier is rescued from a hostile situation and brought back to life using nano technology. With mini robots coursing through his veins, the super sergeant can now fight longer, harder and instantly heal, but is in no way like X-men’s Wolverine… Bloodshot is put to work tracking down his wife’s killer, but is everything as it seems? Did the person he is charged with assassinating really do it, or does the shady organisation which resurrected Diesel’s character have its own agenda? IMDB gives it 5.6